The percentage of containers shipped empty from the Port of Los Angeles was 43.8% (or 1.1 million twenty-foot units) for the 8 months ending February 2012. Incoming containers received empty were a mere 3.6%. The net 40.2% of incoming containers returned empty to their port of destination reflects the trade disadvantage suffered by US manufacturers relative to their Asian competitors; primarily from artificial (suppressed) exchange rates, state subsidy of export industries and protectionism in local markets. While the figures remain high, they show a steady down-trend since 2006. But it will take another 12 years at the current rate of decline for traffic to reach parity, by which time many industries will have suffered irreparable harm.
Shippers attempt to fill containers on their return journey, even at super-low rates, in order to offset the cost of completing the round-trip. Empty containers indicate failure to locate manufactured goods that can compete in export markets. This affects not only the shipper, but the entire economy. You see, those containers leaving the West Coast are not really empty. They contain something far more valuable than the goods being imported. They contain manufacturing jobs — and the infrastructure, skills and know-how to support them.
The enormous imbalance of Australia’s manufactured goods trade can also be seen in the growing mountains of empty containers around the Port areas of Melbourne. Similarly we have lost our basic ability to clothe ourselves or to make anything significant other than some food, houses and some cars.
Our government has happily handed over the future of Australia to their political masters in China.
The West will continue to transfer capabilities overseas until all the skills and wealth built up over centuries is sent overseas under the guise of “free trade” and it is all lost to our children. If a Govt blocks it they are anti capitalist. But if they continue to allow it, it will be criminal. This has to be one of the greatest of follies experimented on such an unbelievably grand scale since 1917. Who was the grand propeller head who sold to us that cheap LCD TVs and toasters is a great swap for control and independance of our economic future? Yeh I feel richer surrounded by my cheap broken junk but I think I would rather have kept my job, my business, my means of generating cash to pay for stuff than just getting the stuff cheaper (and at a cheap quality too) using borrowed money which I cant pay back to the foreign financier.
Australia has also placed all eggs in the one economic egg basket .. not just for selling but buying too. Is it the same economic propeller heads who tell us we should diversify our investments in order to spread risk who also tell us to specialise and compete in the (smaller and smaller number of) goods/service that we are best at? And to just one country; a country with a questionable commitment to “free trade” and one which could at any second say “stop doing business with Australia”. Make sure we do not offend our key customer & key supplier.
I must be missing something here in the new economic theory – what is it?
I am an Australian Aircraft manufacturer producing an Australian designed light plane ( recreational class with folding wings) with high wages and a skill shortage, while still producing in OZ it may not be long when it is sold off overseas as well …you only get one guess to where !!! I have medical a condition which nessesitates a sell off but where are the Australian buyers ?
Unless a miner, training company or tourism operator decides to buy you up I doubt you will get a local buyer. They went offshore maybe decades ago. Your comment would be as relevant if you said you made shoes, clothes, tv’s or nails.
The US Government should print 3 Trillion dollars of US Bank notes, take them to Los Angeles and ship them to China in those empty containers as repayment of some of the US Government debt. Note I did not suggest the issue of 3 Trillion Dolars of Treasury Bonds.
Dollar bills are the same as Treasury bills, they are both obligations of the US government (or its Fed proxy), but with one major difference: they don’t bear interest. The Chinese would love to get their money back but they never can. The yuan would take off like a Pyongyang rocket — and reverse their carefully-crafted trade advantage against the US.